Learning Aloud

American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches offers a ranked list of the top 100 speeches. Most of these speeches are also available through this site. Before you visit, see if you can predict the topc 5.

American Rhetoric home page.

The iTunes Music Store has started supporting video podcasting (there may be a cool name for this but I have yet to discover it). For those of you who are not iTunes users, iTunes is cross-platform and free. The podcasts from the iTunes Music Store are also free. You will need to download and install iTunes on your computer (iTunes Site) to explore the podcasts available through iTunes.

I was not aware that video podcasting was going on, but I read about it in one blog and checked it out. Sure enough. If you want to see what is presently available, visit the podcasts section on the iTunes site (again podcasts are free). I find it difficult to find things that might interest me at the iTunes podcasts site, but in this case all I did was enter “video” in the “search all podcasts” text box and what I consider a significant number of feeds were revealed (try SYSTM). As you might expect, some of the programming is not suitable for children. When you select the feed for a video series, the material is sent to the iTunes system on your personal computer. The video plays in the area of the iTunes screen display where the “album art” is normally shown.

Trading student videos among classes does not require this kind of technology. I do see this is as a way for the educational technology types who enjoy creating multimedia and those who podcast already to share ideas, how-tos, etc. Look for this soon. I am too shy and will stick to blogging.

I find the trend to digitize the collections of libaries, museums and other organizations which accumulate “stuff” truly amazing (e.g., National Archives). At one point, early in this process, a curator explained that you can see many things online that you cannot see at the museum. I did not truly understand this until I had the opportunities to interact with the staff of the ND State Historical Society because of grants and wonder about a bit in the storage areas. (See People of the Upper Missouri – a recent project developed as part of the Teaching American History grant awarded to the Grand Forks Schools).

I was reminded of this again today when I read a post promoting access to the digital resources of the University of Wisconsin. There is some really cool stuff in the back rooms.

Google offers another new service – Google Blog Search. Unlike services such as Bloglines which function by alerting you to new posts on blogs you have designated, Google searches for entries on any of the blogs it scans. I would suggest you go to the “advanced” search page and experiment. Educators might want to note the box for avoiding inappropriate blog content. Try searching for the following phrase – powerful techniques for searching blog content. If this search service works as I expect, you should end up back here.

BBC description

Google ventures into new territory with the Google Desktop. This application appears to sit on top of Windows XP and to offer what Google must see as an improved set of services relative to the Windows-only operating system. So, in addition to accessing Google online services, you can launch your own programs.

What about Mac users? The “Desktop” is similar to the Google Home page I described previously (without the capacity to launch local documents).

Mac users can take some solace in the fact that when I installed Google Desktop on my XP machine I made the mistake of updating Internet security (Norton and Windows). By the time I was done, I had somehow created a conflict between the Norton firewall and the Windows firewall that prevented Firefox from connecting to the Internet. After several hours of playing around, I removed Firefox so that when I find a reason to use the windows machine again (in a month or so), I will not have to try to remember why Firefox no longer works. I don’t know who to blame – Microsoft, Norton, Mozilla or me.

The Washington Post provides an overview of Google Desktop.

I came across a research study that contains a lot of information about blogs, trends in blogging, who blogs, etc. The focus of the study appears to be on age and gender differences (although there is lots of interesting data on other topics). As I understand the conclusion, males tend to attract more attention as bloggers because they are more likely to engage in “filter blogs.” A filter blog attempts to focus readers on a subset of content (perhaps web content, things to read). I suppose this specific entry would be an example – I am attempting to alert you to a specific finding and online resource. Some of the issues of potential causality are interesting? Are the opinions of males more highly regarded (hence they receive more attention for their filter blogs and they persist)? Are women and younger bloggers more interested in posts that are personal experessions? How important is the size of the audience to those focused on personal expression?

An issue any teacher wanting to make use of student multimedia authoring must consider is the visibility such academic work may bring. I would argue this visibility is a big part of the motivation generated by such activities (an audience – real or imagined – brings an increased level of effort out of all of us), but visibility also brings risks. It is difficult to evaluate the actual dangers that are there from anecdotal evidence, but clearly cases in which predators have used the Internet to identify victims exist.

If you are not familiar with what exposure is considered to constitute a risk, consider the legislation described by the New Jersey Department of Education. Read the list of items that are to be considered. Note in this description that student names and photos of students are considered a risk. A parental consent form related to these potential risks is available as a link from this site. I liked the way the consent form differentiated the information sources. I would assume most parents would not want phone numbers, addresses, etc. of their children released to the general public. I would argue there is much less risk involved in the use of a photo.

What I wonder about is how teachers keep track of this information – Sam and Jerry can use their names on a web page, Sally can have her picture included, no mention can be made of Mark. I can imagine a complex grid (students by information sources) that a teacher must carefully consult before approving a project for posting. At what point do teachers throw up their hands and say “this is just not worth it”?

Perhaps the best strategy is to limit student creativity in order to reduce the possibility of errors. I do not know what else to suggest. Simple rules (no names) and project templates (field trip image focused on inanimate objects, e.g., trees, buildings, in this box and a related description in this box) reduce the amount of information the teacher must consider before releasing a student project to the web. We need a range of practical strategies or a great number of teachers will shy away or use the complexity of this situation as an excuse.